Memorial Day Event 2018

Our Memorial Day project continues as 2018 unfolds. In terms of the American War in Viet Nam, this year looms large — fifty years ago the Tet Offensive exploded; the infamous My Lai massacre took its devastating toll; Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; and on and on. Perhaps a loved one of yours was caught up in the net of this murderous war or you were directly impacted yourself by the war.

Over the past few years we have laid 371 letters at the foot of The Wall in Washington, DC (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) on consecutive Memorial Days. We plan on delivering more letters this coming Memorial Day. Will yours be one of them? We sure hope so. To view previous years’ letters, please check out this page of our website: https://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/index.php/memorial-day-event-2017/ — or to order our special edition of collected letters THE LETTERS TO THE WALL. If you are writing a letter for us to deliver this Memorial Day (May 28, 2018), please send your letter to rawlings@maine.edu before May 15th. Your letter will also be posted on our website prior to Memorial Day. Please note that the National Park Service collects each letter for their archival collection and may publicly display letters at a later date. We also plan on putting together another collection of letters using the 2017 and 2018 letters, so by submitting your letter to us, you are also giving us your permission to use it in these ways. Thank you!

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Toward an honest commemoration of the American War in Vietnam

Mission statement

The Full Disclosure campaign is a Veterans For Peace effort to speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam — which is now approaching a series of 50th anniversary events. It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize the Vietnam war and to thereby legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.

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50 Years of Resistance In & Out Of Uniform

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On Burns/Novick PBS Documentary

Philip Jones Griffiths’ Viet Nam

This Month in History: 1969

February First trial of draft resistors known as the Buffalo 9. Around 150 University of Buffalo students and faculty picket the U.S. Courthouse, chanting “Free the Nine — The Trial’s a Crime”. Defendants argue that it was necessary to resist an “immoral, illegal, racist, politically insane war on the Vietnamese people.” Charges include assaulting federal officers, as well as draft evasion. The jury is unable to reach a verdict on several of the defendants but Bruce Beyer is convicted and receives a three-year sentence. Beyer later goes to Canada and then Sweden to help organize fellow resistors and deserters.

February Fort Gordon – Pfc. Dennis Davis editor of (the antiwar newspaper) Last Harass) is given an undesirable discharge.

February 14 The first three of 27 Gls charged with mutiny at the Presidio are found guilty and sentenced to 14, 15, and 16 years at hard labor by a court martial at the San Francisco Presidio stockade (see entry for October 14, 1968). By this time, three of those charged (Blake, Mather, and Pawlowski) had escaped to Canada. On appeal, the long sentences for mutiny were voided by the Court of Military Review in June 1970, and reduced to short sentences for willful disobedience of a superior officer. Rowland, for example, was released in 1970 after a year and a half imprisonment. See The Unlawful Concert by Fred Gardner for a fuller description of the case, as well as entry for October 14, 1968.

February 20 Tacoma – the Shelter Half coffee house’s business license is revoked. See October 1968 entry.

February 22-23 NLF attack 110 targets throughout South Vietnam, including Saigon.

February 25 36 U.S. Marines are killed by NVA (PAVN or VPA) who raid their base camp near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

2016 National Book Award Finalist, Viet Thanh Nguyen:

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory . . . . Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited.”